So I read the quote aloud, and cannot remember a bit of it. I also missed the author. I'm here to find out if anyone happens to know who the author was, at the very least. I wanted to think Thoreau, but I haven't found a single quote to match my vague memory of it.

Every year, people come along asking if anyone has somehow recorded all the entry signs, and every year no one has. Fact is, there are so many signs I often stop reading them about halfway in, but I'm always driving. Well, with any luck, now that I've announced that no one is going to come forward with pictures or video or text of all the signs, I've increased the chance that someone will do just that by virtue of my propensity for being wrong.

Sorry for being harsh, but there are way too many signs. We give up reading after a while too. I presume this is done to slow folks down on the gate road, as I have found many of the paragraphs they put on these signs to be not tremendously interesting or profound. Far better were the messages that could be put on one or two signs -- short and pithy quotes, and of course, funny things.

The best ones of all time were ones like "Burning man was better next year" and the note that they will soon have to burn the man on Wednesday back in 2007.

Many years ago some of my campmates went out to put up a sign saying 'Cheap V1@gra, 3:30 & M' -- in other words spamming the signs, though there was of course no camp at that address. Somebody with no sense of humour quickly took it down.

You might be looking for a quote by the right-wing free-market bastard Milton Friedman:Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

I believe it was elaborated to an extent on the signs, perhaps with creative license... I'm not sure. If anyone has recorded the full text from the festival I would love to know about it too.